William Landay

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My Books

Walter Cronkite and “The Strangler”

In the deluge of clips since Walter Cronkite died a few days ago, the same video seems to come up over and over, like a greatest hits collection: Cronkite announces the JFK and Martin Luther King assassinations, the moon landing, the call to withdraw from Vietnam. I’d like to call your attention to a more obscure clip, a 1961 CBS News exposé called “Biography of a Bookie Joint.”

The show — and Cronkite — make a brief appearance in my novel The Strangler. In the novel, a character named Joe Daley is filmed coming out of a Boston key shop that is a front for a bookie joint. Joe is just a bagman for local cops on the take, but his life goes into a tailspin the moment Walter Cronkite announces, “The man coming out of the door now is a detective. We found that he comes from Station Sixteen, Boston Police Department, just a few blocks away.”

What readers may not have realized is that the CBS News documentary was absolutely authentic. I rendered it virtually word for word from a transcript of the original, altering the narration only for pace and to insert poor Joe Daley into it.

Readers also may not realize that the CBS News exposé played an indirect part in the Boston Strangler murders, which began soon after. The documentary caused a scandal in which the Boston police commissioner, among others, lost his job. When the Strangler murders began and were not immediately solved, the city’s loss of faith in its police department led to a critical mistake: the investigation was removed from the experienced police detectives working the case and transferred to a jury-rigged, politicized “Strangler Bureau.” (The whole story is told in a nonfiction account by Susan Kelly called The Boston Stranglers, which is the best single source on the Strangler cases that you’ll find. If you’re curious about the history of the Strangler years, I recommend it.)

When I was researching my novel The Strangler, in 2005, “Biography of a Bookie Joint” was not available on the web. To see it, I had to go to New York where I watched it at the Museum of Television & Radio (now the Paley Center for Media) on West 52nd Street. There I laboriously transcribed the show on a legal pad. But CBS has finally made this historic show available online. You can watch the whole thing below. (The show runs about an hour.) It is a rare glimpse of the old, seamy, unreconstructed Boston that is the setting for my book.

I always wanted to send a copy of my book to Cronkite, who spent his last years near here, on Martha’s Vineyard. I never did it. I didn’t have the nerve. It seemed presumptuous for a guy who writes meatball mysteries to approach a certified Great Man. But I wonder what Cronkite would have made of his cameo appearance in a story of old Boston.

Also, I recently stumbled on this AP news story which adds an interesting detail: Abraham Swartz, who owned Swartz’s Key Shop, died in February 1962 at age 81, just three months after the original, nationwide broadcast of “Biography of a Bookie Joint” but before the documentary was aired in Massachusetts.

Why the Strangler?

A reader suggests that I use this blog to share a little about how my books develop from initial concept to final draft. I’ll try, but readers should understand that a strange sort of apathy descends as soon as a project is finished. When I am writing, I am obsessed with the book being drafted, absolutely submerged in it. Robert Penn Warren once likened this feeling to having a new baby: you want to check on it constantly, feed it, pat it on the head. But the moment the book is finished, I lose all interest. (Do all novelists feel this way? Any writers out there?) Already, my last book seems a distant memory — which often comes as a surprise to new readers, whose experience of the book is necessarily fresher and more vivid than my own. With that said, here is something I wrote a couple of years ago, when my novel The Strangler was first published, about what drew me to the case and to Boston during the Strangler days and why I thought there might be a novel in it.

Years ago, back when I was a prosecutor, I first heard a rumor that Albert DeSalvo might not actually have been the Boston Strangler. At the time, no one outside law enforcement (and precious few inside it) took the suggestion seriously. The campaign to reopen the Strangler investigation rarely made the news, and when it did, the stories often had a smart-alecky tone — as if we all knew better, and only a crank would really believe it.

To my mother’s generation, who were young adults when the case broke, the idea was plainly ridiculous. After all, they’d lived through it. They’d felt besieged during the murder spree and relieved afterward. Then they’d read Gerold Frank’s best-selling book, and even watched Tony Curtis play DeSalvo as a mincing, menacing Boston Strangler in the movie. Now, twenty or thirty years later, DeSalvo was innocent?

As readers of my novel will know, I don’t delve too deeply into the DeSalvo case, let alone pretend to solve it. Like a lot of historical novels that ask “what if?” (Robert Harris’s Fatherland, for example), I simply take it as a jumping-off point for the story: What if DeSalvo really was the wrong man?

What fascinated me about the idea was not the case itself but what it suggested about this city. In Chinatown, screenwriter Robert Towne fictionalized an actual historical scandal involving real estate and the water supply in Los Angeles. In that scandal, Towne obviously saw something emblematic, something revealing about L.A. The Strangler story gave me a comparable shiver of recognition. It seemed to suggest all sorts of things about Boston — at least about Boston in those years when the city was evolving into its current incarnation. My city, too, had a secret history.

But what did the Strangler case say about this place, exactly? That it was brutal? Corrupt? Close-mouthed? Why did the Strangler controversy seem to me a quintessentially Boston story? I don’t have definitive answers, even now, having long finished writing the book. The signature Boston crime stories of my day (I am 43) [ed: 45 now] often involve secrecy and corruption — rot — in the city’s most trusted, impenetrable institutions: the Catholic church in the case of pedophile priests, the FBI in the Whitey Bulger case. From a distance, the DeSalvo case certainly looks like a close cousin to these — another sinister secret deal, another conspiracy of silence. True Boston.

Or is it? You’ll have to decide for yourself. I don’t pretend to know. I think of novel-writing as a way to explore the world, not to pontificate about it. It is a mistake to assume novelists are intellectuals, or reporters bringing the news (about Boston, about DeSalvo, about crime, about anything). We are just storytellers. And the storyteller’s job is to follow his vision, to bring it to life. Whether there is any truth in what he sees … well, that’s up to the audience — you.

On Moving to a New Publisher in the UK

I have held off announcing this until things were certain, but last week I agreed to move to a new publisher in England, Orion. Orion is a terrific house and a good fit for me. Their crime catalog reads like an all-star team: Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Ian Rankin, Walter Mosley, Harlan Coben, Joseph Finder — the list goes on and on. (One of my favorites, Alan Furst, too.) Coincidentally, my new editor at Orion, Bill Massey, used to work at Bantam-Dell in New York alongside my U.S. editor, the great Kate Miciak. So the stars seem to have aligned, and I am tremendously happy to have landed in such good hands.

For a while now, I’ve thought of my next book — as yet untitled, to be published in fall 2010 or spring 2011 — as a fresh start. In the five or six years since my first book came out, I seem to have become that pitiable creature, the critic’s darling. Which is to say, my books have had glowing reviews but anemic sales.

This is in no way the fault of my previous U.K. publisher, Transworld, where I and my books were treated royally. I suppose it is partly an example — one of many, many such examples — of the serendipity of publishing. As anyone in publishing will tell you, there is a lot of luck involved in making a best seller. Jonathan Galassi remarks in this month’s Poets & Writers magazine that the whole business is a “crapshoot”:

One of the hardest things to come to grips with is how important the breaks are. There’s luck in publishing, just like in any human activity. And if you don’t get the right luck — if Mitchi [Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times] writes an uncomprehending review, or if you don’t get the right reviews, or if books aren’t in stores when the reviews come, or whatever the hell it is — it may not happen.

But my indifferent sales numbers have been my own doing, also. A writer simply cannot hope for commercial success — no matter how good his books are — if he does not produce regularly. And I haven’t. Maybe I just did not understand how unforgiving the market is for unreliable producers. Now I do.

The problem has not been that I write too slowly. If my words-per-hour rate is slow, no doubt I make up for it by logging a hell of a lot of hours at the keyboard. No, the real culprit has been poorly chosen projects that were begun and then scrapped, at considerable cost in time and labor. The solution, I think, is to have my next project lined up with certainty — vetted by editors, with the basic development of plot and characters already done — so that, the moment I finish one book, I can begin drafting the next. A writer cannot wait until he finishes one book before thinking about the next. Obvious as that sounds, it’s been a hard lesson for me.

With all that said, I feel like I am on the cusp of a run of good books. A writer is in the unfortunate position of having to learn his craft in full view of the public. His mistakes are there on the bookshelf for all to see. I have at least a few of those early blunders out of the way now, and I am ready to relaunch, a little wiser this time. The switch to a new publisher feels like a part of that transition.

The Breakthrough, at last

After an excruciating three weeks of trying — and failing — to make a difficult chapter work, yesterday morning I woke up at 5:45 with this sentence in my head: “There is so much to tell.” And that was it. Six words, six syllables, and I knew I had it. I wanted to rush out of bed, up to my office, and write it fast, while I had the thing in my head.

But when I got up, there was Henry, my five-year-old, in the bathroom peeing, and when he was done he came out and hugged me around my leg and said he wanted to come into the big bed to snuggle. So I climbed back into bed and we snuggled awhile, until Henry announced, “I’m done snuggling.”

Then I pulled on a pair of jeans and bolted up to my office to write the first few pages of this chapter in an extended gush. Most of it poured out in long run-on sentences — and … and … and — but the new material is good, and I am elated to have broken through, finally.

There is nothing worse than being stuck. The project loses momentum, and with each passing day it becomes harder and harder to get that boulder moving again. Today, I feel massively relieved. Now the thing is to keep it moving, to maintain that momentum.